The area of market intelligence (or simply intelligence) and in particular the area of direct marketing continues to grow while merchants, advertisers, and other interested parties are constantly looking for means of making messages, rewards, and opportunities or plain knowledge of individuals or group of individuals profiles more relevant and attractive than those of competitors. In addition advertisers, for example, are constantly looking for better and more accurate ways of targeting the messages, offers, and opportunities (“messages”) so that their products and services are selected and acted upon by the recipients of the messages in what is known in the art as a “customer call-to-action”. That is, the recipient or people associated with the recipient will actually take advantage of any offers announced by the message and otherwise engage the services related to the message(s). Furthermore, advertisers are constantly seeking ways of measuring the effectiveness or response of their marketing campaigns. One form of direct marketing is the use of direct mail. One of the disadvantages of direct mail is that it may alienate or annoy some recipients by constantly having to deal with unwanted or unsolicited mail, sometimes referred to as “junk mail”. Another form of direct marketing or advertisement is the use of pop-ups, spamming (mass mailing) of Internet or web related information. Users are able to block some of these items thereby not letting advertisers deliver their messages. Another form of direct marketing is telemarketing, where marketers attempt to deliver unsolicited telephone messages. Customers may block these types of messages thereby impeding their delivery.
Up to this time advertisers have turned to a multitude of approaches for better targeting their audiences. These range from target customer lists, questionnaires, live or online surveys, analysis of on-line behavior including but not limited to web pages visited, key words on mail streams, geographic and or demographic origin or destination of mail, online queries, and so on. While these methods provide differing levels of accuracy there is still a need to further refine desired targets, cohorts or demographic searches based on life styles.
Currently with the popularization and prevalence of digital photography or imaging there is a very large inventory of digital images stored on computer memories, camera memories, removable memories devices, and commercial and private databases, all potentially and seamlessly connected by the Internet. The art lacks the ability to utilize these images as sources of valuable, unique and highly personalized, information regarding people's preferences, behaviors, life styles, demographics and unarticulated product/service features.